Eclectic and striving never to follow paths into ruts, the OF Blog focuses on essays, reviews, interviews, and other odds and ends that might be of interest to fans of both literary and speculative fiction. Now with a cute owl for your enjoyment.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Thirty-six German-language books. Thirty-three of them cost 10¢ each; the other three were 95¢ each.

Did my biweekly trip to McKay's today. Traded in my entire Sandman collection (I plan on buying the Ultimate volumes in the next year or so, so after not having read them again these past 2-3 years, I could justify doing so now in order to add to my "rainy day" collection of books) and certain others. Ended up with almost $94 in store credit. Spent about $65 or so on 48 books, one of which is a new 2012 release. Not too shabby. Going to read the Freud book in Spanish to see just how true the stories of how his English translator altered the semantics of his theories via Latinization of certain expressions.

The Livy is in Latin, the other five are in Spanish/Spanish translation.

The DeLillo will be read later for a Gogol's Overcoat read-on; the McCarthy completes my collection of his Border Trilogy, which I will read sometime in May/June, with possible reviews.

Heard positive things about the new Johnson novel; for years I have been meaning to read Ellison's posthumous novel.

I am a fan of Banana Yoshimoto's fiction. I have not read these two novels, however.

I've read Banana Yoshimoto's short stories in her Lizard collection. I wasn't tremendously impressed, but some authors do better with novels than short stories. I'm curious how her novels hold up. I've read some Japanese lit (Kawabata's Snow Country, some Mishima, and of course Haruki Murakami). I do enjoy it.

You realize you bought two copies of the same Ebner-Eschenbach book, Larry? Well I guess with 10¢ a copy it doesn't matter much. ;-)

The story of Freud's mistranslation is true in at least one central aspect: In German there is a very clear distinction between Instinkt (meaning an animalic instinct or inborn behaviour pattern) and Trieb (the word Freud used for his Eros and Thanatos). The two terms roughly equal the Spanish distinction between instinto and pulsión. By rendering Trieb as instinct and subsequently as instinto (while pulsión would have been a much more adequate translation), the semantics of Freud's central theoretical term was indeed heavily altered for the Spanish-speaking audience.